BEST OF THE NET Winner, Cited in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2015-16 & PUSHCART POETRY FINALIST 2017

From The Almost

As flowers in the bathtub
Trees on the subway
A garden in a closet
A locust in a backpack
Security guards in the woods
Octopi in a bunker
A wife on a fern
A birdhouse, look, in the lake
A speech bubble alone
You bump into ectopia

The newspaper deliveryman’s car being towed

this morning. Bigger wrecks a body at a time. Stalled

I will be going out of the house, its consciousness

of privacy and tools into the ecology of broadening out—

the people to run into, the cars to consider, anything

can happen once I leave the house. The sunlit cars

with children are backing out.

With neon-yellow liquid in the syringe
“Assume the position,” she says.
My johnny’s freewheeling.

“Did you meet the doctor tall
and handsome?” the nurse asks.
Easy on the eyes, I don’t say.

Why am I the one to tell her
who’s been here? After the nurse
double gloves, I keep tracing

the lighter skin below her eyes
where a shadow could be. I can’t find
the space between explicitness and

escape. After a chemotherapeutic shot
to dissolve the sprout I spam a little
sick and foul. Pricked

with sadness I’ll stink up affection
with a mix of oblivion and whimsy.
The medics circle through.